The people are all A-list and care about at least one of the two aspects of the dual bottom-line mission: profit and energy use reduction. The CEO & President genuinely care about everyone in the company. The stocked breakroom, group lunches, various clubs, and happy hours are a plus.

Cons

Over the past two years, the coupany has tripled in number of employees. Perhaps because of this, politics between parts of the company has ranged from confusing to nasty in the past few months. Some middle-managers are more focused about their rank and position when they should be supporting people on their team or focusing on bottom-line results. The result is an environment is one where lower-level employees tend to get things done despite their respective bosses as well as a bit of fear.

Advice to ManagementAdvice

Dan and Alex should take a hard look and their second-level direct reports and ask not only if they have the technical skills but the people skills for a growing company.

The best reason to work at OPOWER are the startup culture, the nice managers, and the friendliness of the employees.

Cons

The downside of working at OPOWER is that it is growing so fast that there are some real culture and process issues from the difference generations of employees.

Advice to ManagementAdvice

I would tell them to try to better structure departments and define roles. It can be hard to keep employees if they end up doing work different from what they were hired to do or are put so far out of their comfort zone, they are destined to fail.

OPOWER is executing very well on a tremendous opportunity to make a big difference in how we think about energy conservation in this country. Everyone is tightly focused on the goal of helping consumers save energy, from the sales and product teams, through the engineering organization and down through the operations group. Communication between the teams is very open and transparent, and everyone is remarkably open to ideas on how to do *anything* better. There's no cross-disciplinary defensiveness, and everyone I've worked with so far is remarkably competent at what they do. Everyone so far has also been remarkably generous with their time. Technical and product documentation on the wiki is very complete for an organization this size, and the new-hire process (getting userids/laptop/building keys/etc) was surprisingly smooth, also for an organization this size. There are some bumps needing to be managed around the torrid pace of growth, but that's a high-class kind of problem to have. The office environment is very social and engaged, but people are respectful if you've got a deadline and need to focus. Plenty of places to hunker down in a quiet corner if you need to. The product development team is very forward thinking in two ways: one, test engineering requires software engineers who are interested in testing, instead of just looking for button pushers; two, the development engineers are incredibly deeply invested in unit and integration testing and in supporting the test engineers on system level and acceptance testing.

Cons

The San Francisco office (new engineering practice being built) is a little isolated from the DC office (headquarters), but that should be mitigated as we gain critical mass. Likewise, bi-coastal commuting during the ramp up phase is a bit of a burden on work/life balance, but everyone on the team understands it and is accommodating. Likewise, that will be less of an issue as critical mass builds in SF.

Advice to ManagementAdvice

Continue to be as open and transparent with the team about what's going on and where we're going. Try as hard as you can to make that openness scale as the team grows. Continue to keep the focus on delivering the most important things that our customers need so they keep paying us, but balance that with the engineering realities and the development, testing and operational levels. Continue to promote even more the concept that infrastructure, scaling and agility are first-class priorities within product and engineering and ops.